Second Period

Philosophy made its real entrance in the Syriac-speaking cultivated world only at the beginning of the sixth century, with the first translations of Aristotle’s logical and physical works (overview in Brock 1993) along with commentaries on them. Plato was never translated into Syriac. The Categories were translated (Gottheil 1892-1893; see the study of all the extant Syriac versions by Georr 1948), presumably in the first half of the century, by an anonymous translator, and have been commented at length by Sergius of Resh‘ayna (d. 536), who nevertheless did not know the translation just mentioned. Porphyry’s Isagoge as well was translated by an anonymous author in the first

Half of the sixth century (Freimann 1897; Brock 1988). The same Sergius wrote a short introduction to the whole logical auvre of Aristotle (partial translation in Hugonnard-Roche 2004). He also translated two other works of the Aristotelian tradition: the pseudo

Aristotelian treatise De mundo (De Lagarde 1858; Ryssel 1880-1881), and perhaps Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe. Sergius is most of all famous for his translation into Syriac of the pseudo-Dionysian Corpus, and for having introduced Galen into Syriac: the ninth-century doctor and translator Hunayn b. Ishiaq informs us that he had translated some 30 works of Galen’s: four fragments, three of which attributed to him by Sachau (1870), have come down to us: from the Ars medica, from the De alimentorum facultatibus, and from the De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus. A short treatise on the influence of the moon, based on the De diebus decretoriis was edited by Merx (1885).

Two other logical texts from the Organon are preserved in anonymous translations: the De interpretatione (for the text see Hoffmann 1869) and the Prior Analytics until I, 7: for these works, scholars could not give a precise date, so that at present it is not possible to determine their context. We also have a version of Theophrastus’ Metereology (Daiber 1992; Wagner and Steinmetz 1964).